1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer systems and, more particularly, to management of applications operable on computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computer systems are often configured to process large quantities of information in increasingly complex application environments. For example, innovations in information technology have led to numerous applications for collecting, managing, and processing data corresponding to a wide range of business activities, often in near-real time. Advances in multimedia and telecommunications have led to increasing management of audio, video, textual, and other types of information in the digital domain.
As more sophisticated solutions to information management problems evolve, computer systems typically become more complex, as do the applications running on them. An enterprise may find itself with thousands of computer systems under management, many with varying capabilities and different installed applications. Further, some complex applications may be distributed across numerous geographically dispersed computer systems. For example, a retail business may network thousands of point-of-sale terminals to a central server configured to operate an inventory management system. The inventory management system may be tightly linked to procurement and accounting systems in order to improve supply chain and financial management.
Reliability of system operation is often a critical factor for system performance, and consequently organizational performance. Loss of data or unavailability of various critical applications may cause substantial disruption. Referring to the previous example, loss of sale information, for example, may lead to significant problems in inventory management or even an inability to transact business.
To address reliability concerns, system management policies may be instituted to ensure that critical data is recoverable and critical applications available in the event of a system failure. However, as applications proliferate and become increasingly complex, ensuring that the proper applications are identified as critical and subsequently ensuring that all necessary components of such applications are properly protected against system failure becomes increasingly difficult. Further, as applications become more sophisticated, often numerous different applications may be configured to access and modify an underlying set of critical data. In such cases, obtaining a consistent state of such data for system management purposes, such as creating backups, may be complicated by the activity of the various applications accessing the data.